Georgia O'Keeffe
The paintings of Georgia O'Keeffe are part of the identity of American culture. Born in 1887 in Sun Prairie, Wisconsin, O'Keeffe studied at the Art Institute of Chicago and the Art Students League in New York. Her most significant teaching mentor became Arthur Wesley Dow at Columbia's Teachers College. Early in her career, she worked as a teacher of art in Texas. Through a friend from Teacher's College, Alfred Stieglitz saw her work and curated her first exhibit at his 201 Gallery in 1916. Stieglitz became not only a champion of O'Keeffe's work, but also her husband in 1924. In 1927, the Brooklyn Museum exhibited her work, followed by the Museum of Modern Art in 1929. The Whitney Museum of American Art purchased her work for the permanent collection in 1932, as did the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1934. When Stieglitz died in 1946, O'Keeffe moved permanently to New Mexico, a place that continued to be her inspiration. The close-up images of desert flowers, shells, rocks, and bleached animal bones from New Mexico's landscape would make O'Keeffe's paintings some of the most recognizable in American art. The first retrospective of O'Keeffe's work was held at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1943. She was elected to the National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1949, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1962. She received the Presidential Medal of Freedom Gerald Ford in 1977, and the National Medal of Arts from Ronald Reagan in 1985. O'Keeffe died in 1986. The Georgia O'Keeffe Museum opened in 1997 in Sante Fe, New Mexico to hold the largest collection of her work.